It’s that time of the year again. 2019 is off to a flying start for Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs). That means it’s the perfect time to make solid resolutions…digitalization, compliance, supplier management, collaboration…and stick to them!

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2019!

Top leaders all have one thing in common: they have very eclectic tastes when it comes to what they read and what they’re interested in. Which pretty much describes all of you, based on the wide-ranging entries on our list of Top 10 Resources for 2018 in source-to-pay and contract management as defined by you.

November was all about success; how to achieve it, undermine it, prepare for it, and customers who embody it, like Alliant Credit Union and Watermark Retirement Communities. Anytime you start out on a new project, one of the first questions asked is likely, “how do we measure success?”

CPE programs, training workshops, industry events like the SIG Summit, eWorld Procurement and ProcureCon, even podcasts and Ted Talks; what they all share in common is providing content to satisfy those who are constantly striving for self-improvement. Likewise, most of our resources focus on helping you translate that need for improvement to your Source-to-Pay, contract management, sourcing and other processes. This October DetermiNews has plenty to accompany you on your path to process efficiency.

Procurement was center stage again this month (fitting, in terms of it being a summer of trade uncertainty). We covered the discipline from a number of different angles, from taxes to tactics. But in looking back, one thought from Andrew Bartolini, founder of Ardent Partners, stood out as particularly relevant to how procurement as a whole is developing: “While intelligence is critical, a precise measure of procurement intelligence is less important than the performance it generates. In point of fact, as a department (and the entire profession) matures, the definition of procurement intelligence becomes a moving target; and it becomes relative to nearly all stakeholders in the source-to-settle spectrum.”

Procurement’s desire to be agile is as well-documented and frequently discussed as our interest in transformation. In both cases, however, we are at risk of falling into the ‘strategy trap’ – the lack of clarity, direction and actionability that accompany all things non-tactical.

Depending on who you ask, France was either a shoe-in or a long-shot to win the World Cup this month in Russia. Why they won is very well explained by this paraphrased excerpt from the New York Times:

(The team) will be remembered for what it was: a team of exceptional talent and ruthless efficiency, a group in which every player knew his job and performed it flawlessly. All that it achieved — through diligent planning, hard work, relentless discipline — was remarkable; a team of top-class talents willing to sublimate their individual games to a collective mission.”

It also sounds very much like a description of a world-class procurement organization.

Is Spend Under Management a “Has Been?”

In this, the third of our four-part blog series for the release of CPO Rising 2018: The Age of Intelligence, Kelly Barner of Buyers Meeting Point delves into the myriad facets of Procurement Performance in Chapter Three. There’s no debate that the importance and influence of procurement is on the rise across industries, but the question is, are procurement’s metrics – like spend under management – truly representative of those accomplishments?

If necessity is the mother of invention, then reinvention must be the offspring of a continuous improvement process. Back in flight school, there was an industry group with a major professional education component, whose slogan was “When you’re good, you’re always learning.” The more source-to-pay professionals and practitioners I meet, and the more research and whitepapers I read, that same slogan could easily apply to procurement, sourcing and contract management, as well. As one Determine customer sagely told me at a recent User Group, “Comfort zones makes me uncomfortable.”

Our most read blogs

In the past, we’ve taken a close look at how the procurement maturity curve affects its focus. Two recent posts addressed issues concerning the evolving role of procurement savings, information and technology. In this two-part blog series, we’ll consider supply chain risk in the context of procurement’s maturity. We start by looking at supplier risk […]

The podcast series that’s all about minding your business in contract management and source to pay. Determine recently announced their new Contract Management App for Salesforce. And while Salesforce is a big name in the B2B world, procurement professionals might understandably question what this means for teams outside of sales.

Expanding the value of contracts by leveraging relationships on the Salesforce platform. As the leading authority on all things contract related, The International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM) has a truer picture of the current state of contracts at any given time than anyone. As such, IACCM looks at the impact of contracts […]

Integrating Determine contracts with Salesforce contacts to drive business opportunities. The Determine Contract Management App on the Salesforce Appexchange is yet another way to be more agile, proactive and responsive in the ever-competitive business world. The following screenshots show you how easy it is to request, manage and collaborate on contracts between our Salesforce app […]

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